New study indicates that having a pet makes you more attractive for potential dates

Finding love in the modern world can be a tricky business. If you want to be in with a chance of meeting anyone, you have to sign up to some newfangled form of online dating; and if you actually want to win someone over with your five-picture, 100-word profile, you have to do something pretty special to stand out amongst a sea of other equally-lonely individuals.

So what can you do, other than be conventionally attractive and hope for the best?

Well, you could always chuck a witty one-liner into your biography and hope they scroll far enough to actually get to it. Or you could turn your whole profile into a sort of comedic bit. Or, as one study has recently suggested, you could just get yourself a dog to pose with.

Credit: Getty

"Pet Wingman", an experiment carried out by Webbox, recently tracked the success rates of daters on Tinder and Bumble in order to see how having a dog affected how frequently someone got swiped right. And, whaddya know, it turns out that having a cute pooch in your pic significantly ups your hit rate when it comes to getting matches.

The study followed one man and one woman as they used the two dating apps for two weeks. During the first week, the subjects used a profile picture of themselves on both platforms and swiped right 100 times. In the second week, they did the same thing - only this time they had a dog in the picture with them.

The experiment found that the male subject attained 30 per cent more matches on Tinder when he featured a dog in his main profile picture, and got a whopping 75 per cent more messages (a little over a quarter of which were about the pup in question). He also got three times as many super likes as he did before, and, on average, had 53 per cent more interactions.

Credit: Pexels

The female subject, on the other hand, got 117 per cent more matches (wow!) on Tinder and received 150 per cent more messages. Two of the messages she received were about the dog (but, hey, an in is an in, right?), and she got double the amount of super likes as she did before. In total, she had 122 per cent more interactions.

With Bumble, the results were a little harder to collate, seeing as only women can initiate conversation, but again, both the man and the woman received a greater number of matches and interactions when they included a dog in their profile picture.

Based on 100 swipes across both platforms, this particular face-off found that women benefitted more from having a pup in their pic, with the female subject getting 69 per cent more matches (on average) when she included a photo with her furry companion. The male subject, on the other hand, still gained a very respectable 38 per cent more matches.

Credit: Webbox

Clearly, then, if you want more success in your dating life, you need to get yourself the right sort of wingman... or should that be paw man? Either way, find yourself a pooch to pose with and *boom* your match rate should start to increase immediately.